1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to group communications. More particularly, embodiments of the present invention relate to communication management based on network attributes and on application attributes.
2. Description of the Related Art
Real-time collaborative applications, such as on-line gaming, enable large numbers of users (participants) to interact to achieve mutually dependent outcomes. Because of their collaborative nature, collaborative applications often have numerous quality of service (QoS) constraints such as end-to-end communication delays, frequency of state updates, quality of data received by the users, which must be met. Meeting such constraints over a distributed communication network requires effective communication management.
As more users participate in a given application the difficulty of implementing effective communication management increases. Eventually it becomes necessary to cluster users according to their communication interest. Clustering reduces wasted bandwidth and aids in constructing distribution trees that satisfy real-time QoS constraints and network node forwarding capacity constraints. While QoS constraints and network constraints can be addressed independently, a more efficient distribution tree can be constructed by addressing QoS constraints and network constraints at the same time.
A communication network can be characterized by a large number of network parameters, such as communication delays between pairs of network nodes, the forwarding capacity of the network nodes, and the packet loss ratios between pairs of network nodes. These network parameters can be mapped into delay maps, capacity maps, and loss maps. For example, network delay maps that map network nodes into multi-dimensional network coordinate spaces which are constructed from selective measurements between pairs of network nodes can be used to improve network communications.
While improving network communications using network maps is beneficial, such network parameters have nothing to do with the communication requirements of a user at the application level. That is, collaborating participants may interact in an application differently, and thus have different communication interests.
A user's communication interest can be modeled as a multi-dimensional interval within an N-dimensional interest space. Each coordinate can represent a topic of interest for one or more participating users, and thus the N-coordinates represent a union of all user communication interests.
Clustering users according to application attributes and clustering of network nodes based on network attributes (round-trip delays, forwarding capacity, etc) are both known. However, such clustering methods may not be optimal in collaborative applications. Therefore, a new method of communication clustering based on both network attributes and on application attributes would be useful.